Alfresco Community Conference in DC

Last week, I attended the Alfresco Community Conference in DC where, among other things, Alfresco's Surf platform was discussed. Alfresco is moving in a bold new technical direction: towards a Web 2.0 framework developed from the ground up, completely overtaking its current Enterprise web framework based on JSF. This is bold because most vendors incrementaly develop over thier legacy frameworks. Alfresco has chosen to radically rewrite theirs.

One of Alfresco's key competitive advantages is that it had the clarity of heindsight. Alfresco could look back at the experience of the past: including Documentum, where it's CTO John Newton was co-founder, and former engineers of Vingette, Interwoven and others. This experience has allowed them to develop a better architecture from the ground up, solving the pain of the past, in a culture steeped in risk taking and innovation. Further, its committment to the community and to open principles has allowed it to continue to lead in innovation, rather than falling behind.

Sometimes openness and innovation leads to chaos. Several potential Alfresco users have hedged thier commitment to alfresco to see what Alfresco 3.0 is all about. Its radical rearchitecture has risked alienating customer customization of its previous JSF based frameworks. It is unclear what existing customers will do with this new technology, but Alfresco has committed to continue to support its legacy JSF applications for a time.

For those of us who are just starting to develop on Alfresco, the future is wide open. My company has decided to participate as Beta customers to Alfresco Enterprise 3.0. This leads us to figuring out how we can capitalize on this new platform architecture, and how to avoid the inevitable barbs of its newness. Among other blog tracks, I will update my experiences with Alfresco Surf platform with how-to's and findings. I hope this proves useful to some.

From a Technical perspective, Alfresco has rearchitected its front end web client and services relying on Web 2.0 components from Yahoo User Interface framework. The web client talks to services via RESTful JSON enabled services typically created using Alfresco's webscript framework. Surf introduces a new component model with page and component dispatching frameworks. Web client things like Templates, Pages and Components are defined declaratively leveraging lightweight XML, like the webscript framework for declaring RESTful services on alfresco. Like services, client component behavior is developed in JavaScript and benefit from a client side alfresco object model to interact with predefined components and/or alfresco remote services.

As I learn this new framework, I will blog on each step I take. I hope this will be helpful to others also learning Surf.